Bluish Coder

A collection of Lisp articles

Paolo Amoroso points to a large collection of Common Lisp articles by Gene Michael Stover and contributors.

Haskell and Erlang

Joel Reymont has another post comparing Haskell development against Erlang.

He has recently rewritten the work he did in Haskell to develop poker bots for testing a poker server into Erlang:

Overall, I spent 10-11 weeks on the Haskell version of the project. The end result did not turn out as elegant as I wanted it to be and wasn't easy on the QA techs. They told me that the Erlang code was easier to understand and they preferred it. It took me less than 1 week to rewrite the app in Erlang. It's the end of that week and I'm already way past the state of the Haskell version. The Erlang code at 3900 LOC including examples and is about 1/2 of the Haskell code.

His post provides a great breakdown comparing developing between the two languages for this problem domain. Most of the issues seem to come down to lack of library support for concurrency and serialisation in Haskell, or the fact that those areas are not as heavily used in Haskell so have more problems.

Real World Haskell Part 2

I mentioned previously that Joel Reymont is using Haskell these days for some of his 'real world' programming systems. I hoped at the time that he would outline some of his stuff on his weblog with comparisons to Erlang.

Since then he has put up a Haskell vs Erlang post where he describes some of the things he's come across while using Haskell to write a distributed testing tool for his poker server. Both his poker server and distributed tester are heavily network oriented products. One of Joels comments on using Haskell vs Erlang is:

Erlang is the language for network programming!

He comments that when writing in Erlang he concentrated mainly on the actual logic of the application rather than the concurrency, network, binary parsing, etc as Erlang handles the latter. With Haskell he has spent most of the time on the infrastructure and very little on the application logic.

I did get my Haskell app to the point where it's about 90% ready and working but most of my attention was spent on... binary packet parsing, serialization, networking and heavy-duty concurrency. Oh, yeah, and minimizing memory usage. Yes, it's working now but it took blood, sweat and tears. It's now two months later and I have yet to see the Haskell app launch thousands of poker clients and run them for hours.

Interestingly he is still continuing with Haskell:

Based on the above, would I continue coding in Haskell or go back to Erlang? Not really! There's a steep learning curve to Haskell but the experience is extremely rewarding. Your code looks neat and if it compiles then it probably works since the type checker has been all over it.

Joel goes further into why he likes Haskell in a later post.

Factor help system

Slava has been busy with Factor lately. Not only has he done a lot more on the AMD 64 backend, he's writing a help system that runs within Factor.

Family History Research

I'm on a break from work over Christmas/New Year so decided to so some more family tree research. It's a subject I got interested in about a year ago when I started my Pitcairn Island news weblog and wanted to find more about my Pitcairn ancestry.

Lately I've had some luck tracking down some UK ancestors so I decided to fire up a new blog on doing family history research from New Zealand - mostly writing about the online services available and eventually some of the software I've written to help manage the genealogy information (in Factor and Erlang mainly). If you're interested in that sort of thing, visit My Genealogy or grab its atom feed. Doing this as a weblog also has the positive side effect of putting the names I'm gathering information about onto the web so that google and other search engines can pick up searches from people looking for the same people.